Persuasive Games: Little Black Sambo

[Scribblenauts' vast dictionary accidentally includes an archaic racial slur. In this opinion piece, game designer and writer Ian Bogost analyzes the ethical quandary -- and, more importantly, the ensuing response.]

The distinctive feature of 5th Cell's critically-acclaimed
Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts is its enormous dictionary of terms, any
of which can be written to summon objects to solve puzzles in the game. Just
about anything you might want to write, from "acai berry" to
"zygote," gets transformed into a functional object.

With well over twenty thousand words represented, some are bound
to be surprising. And indeed, shortly after its release, a player found and
reported
an unusual term in the game's dictionary: "sambo."

"Sambo" is a racial slur that originated in
eighteenth century British and American English. It was, and remains, a
derogatory way to refer to a black man.

While its origins remain somewhat
mysterious, the term is best known today thanks to the 1894 children's book
Little Black Sambo, which tells the story of a boy named Sambo who outwits a
series of tigers who threaten to eat him.

The cultural context for Little Black Sambois complex. Its
author, Helen Bannerman, was a Scot living in Madras during the period of
British colonization. This explains both the tigers and the
"blackness" of the boy, since the British often referred to Indians
as black.

Yet, the name she chose for the boy referred primarily to a largely
American term for African slaves. While the original edition caricatured
Southern Indian appearances, later editions, including those published in the
U.S., depicted Sambo as a "darky" or a minstrel golliwogg, further
cementing its association with the negative racial stereotype of a negro
simpleton.

By the 1930s, the Little Black Sambocharacter appeared
regularly in popular culture, including a variety of animation adaptations of
Bannerman's story. In this 1935 cartoon, the characters are clearly meant to
refer to African American blackness, as the addition of the black mammy and
stereotypical speech suggest.

But by this time, negative reactions to the story and figure of
black Sambo were already beginning to appear. As the years passed, many began
criticizing the book as offensive to black children, and it gradually fell out
of favor in libraries and schools, even as other editions appeared that
attempted to rescue the story from its racist roots.

(Among these is the 1996
The Story of Little Babaji, a direct copy of Bannerman's original text with new
illustrations by Fred Marcellino. This edition became a best-seller, and
Marcellino was credited with rescuing the tale from its accidental fate as a
symbol of American racism.)

Give its century of racial baggage, one can see why it would be
surprising to discover that Scribblenauts recognizes "sambo"
at all. But the game does much more than just recognize terms: it translates
each typed word into an object with different properties and behaviors.

Entering the word "sambo" produces what appears to be a
watermelon. And as Brian Ashcraft, Brian Crecente, and Stephen Totilo observed
in their coverage of the game at Kotaku, the watermelon too has a long
history of African-American stereotyping, making the inclusion of
"sambo" seem even more racially motivated.

Yet, it wasn't intended to be. In his interview with Kotaku, Scribblenauts
creative director Jeremiah Slaczka insisted that neither his game nor his
company are racist. And I believe him, partly because he also admitted that he
had no idea what "sambo" meant, let alone that it had a history.

According to 5th Cell, they included "sambo" because it
is also a Spanish term for a type of gourd that grows on the chilacayote plant,
one that rather resembles a watermelon. Apparently the watermelon-like graphic
was simply reused for the sambo, a necessary strategy when one must literalize
tens of thousands of different terms.

The most interesting feature of the Scribblenauts sambo fiasco is not that it offers evidence that 5th Cell (or some rogue agent within it) wishes to make negative racial comments about African-Americans by sneaking a slur into a game, nor that the term didn’t get vetted and removed before launch, nor that 5th Cell didn’t issue an earnest apology, even if their publisher Warner Bros. Interactive eventually did.

No, the interesting part is that Slaczka didn't know what
"sambo" meant in the first place. Or more precisely, what that
ignorance signifies.

It turns out this is a common unfamiliarity. Reading the comments
on the Kotaku post, or the weirdly apologetic Joystiq follow-up,
or the many forum discussions like the lively and often idiotic one at NeoGAF,
it becomes clear that many people aren't familiar with Sambo at all.

While cartoons like the animation above would never reach the
airwaves today, the figure of Sambo did last far beyond the 1930s. Perhaps most
notably, Sambo's was the name of a chain of family restaurants, similar to
Denny's, which thrived from 1957 to 1982.

The name started innocuously enough:
Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett founded the original restaurant in Santa
Barbara (the only one that remains), and combined parts of their names (Sam
+ Bohnett) to create Sambo's.

They quickly realized the association with Little Black Sambo, and
given the popularity of the book and the character they decorated the
restaurants with scenes from its pages. The restaurant was well-known, popular,
and everywhere, boasting 1,200 locations in 47 states by the late 1970s. The
chain even makes an appearance on the cover of well-known photographer Stephen
Shore's complete works.

If you read the coverage and conversations attached to the
revelation of "sambo" in Scribblenauts, many players --
particularly those previously unfamiliar with the term -- suggest that the very
idea of discussing the inclusion of this word in the game is ludicrous.

Some
slough off
the situation as an unfortunate but unimportant accident. Some deny the very
existence of racial significance in the situation. Some suggest
that the coverage itself enacts racial violence by reintroducing an
"obscure" slur back into the common imagination.

Some even accuse
the coverage itself of logocentrism, angry that the Spanish sense of a word
might be subjugated to the English one.

In all these cases, a common attitude prevails: this is not a big
deal. It is a distraction, and it deserves only of limited attention.
"Sambo," this attitude holds, is just a word.

But here's the problem: Scribblenauts is a game about
words. That's its payload. Indeed, it is a game about a very many words and
their relative uniqueness. It is a game about what words mean and do when
mustered in particular situations. Its puzzles are mundane and uninteresting,
until new terms alight upon them.

This is not a politically questionable song
accidentally included in a game's soundtrack (Little Big Planet), nor a
fiction associated with a known anti-gay agitator (Shadow Complex), nor
a weirdly blatant and misplaced representational gaffe (Resident Evil 5).
In Scribblenauts, every word draws attention to itself, by necessity and
by design.

We might conclude that Scribblenauts is a game whose very
goal is to make us think about the words people utter, and responses we expect.
In this sense, and in direct opposition to the responses Kotaku's coverage has
procured, the discourse Scribblenauts' "sambo" produces is precisely
the purpose of the game. It is a game meant to make us think and rethink
our words, their uses, and their implicit behavior. And the outcry and
confusion shows that it is successful.

What sense, then, might we make of "sambo?" The idea
that this slur has lost much of its sense startles me. I am in my early
thirties. I remember reading Little Black Sambo. I remember going to the
Sambo's restaurant. I remember being both charmed and disturbed by both. When I
consider that the idea might have fallen so far into disuse as to disappear,
two feelings well up in me.

On the one hand, it is tempting to celebrate this new ignorance.
If a more accepting and less bigoted society is one we want to live in, then
there is some sign of cultural success when a racial slur obsolesces.

But on the other hand, this very neglect points to a social ill
even worse than racism itself: disavowal. We must strive for more than the
destruction of stereotype, slur, and other visible signs of bigotry, as if
eliminating the symptoms also cures the cause.

Barack Obama's now-famous speech on racism
during the 2008 election was smart and moving not because it resolved anything
about race in America, but because it acknowledged the thorny tangle that
arises when we think and talk about race -- and when we don't.

Anger and
resentment and fear on both sides -- on all sides. Obama called it a stalemate,
a deadlock that can only be overcome by trying something new, rather than
issuing new helpings of blame and praise, opportunity and concession.

Here in the land of video games, our battles are usually much more
lowly. They are fictional, and fantastic, and ultimately unimportant. Often we
have to work very hard to find meaning in such works and our experiences of
them, struggling to shout above the din of conversations about politics and
literature and economics and film and art to make our work appear to have even
a trifle of relevance.

Yet, when such matters are thrust upon us by happenstance, what do
we do? We resist. We repudiate.
"It's just a game," we say. "Don't ruin my experience." But
I say, what if this is the experience? What if messy quandaries about
the ambiguity of "sambo" is precisely the sort of thing that Scribblenauts
was meant to bring us? Then we'd have to face the uncomfortable and fantastic
muddle that a game helped us discover by accident.